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Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

fabiensanglard.net

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Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#41

Post by ThatPlayer »

qalmakka wrote: post #21

> One of the exceptional characteristics of the Super Nintendo was the ability for game cartridges (cart) to pack more than instructions and assets into ROM chips Wasn't this true even on other Nintendo consoles? Gameboy and Gameboy Color cartridges did similar if not even more outlandish things, like the GameBoy Camera

Gameboy Advance could do it too. Yoshi Topsy-Turvey and WarioWare: Twisted had gyro sensors. Boktai had a light sensor. Also the Nintendo e-Reader for scanning cards.

Even the Nintendo DS could do it, though I'm not sure it was used outside of flashcarts like the SuperCard that included an additional CPU.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#42

Post by b112 »

MenhirMike wrote: post #13
hollow-moe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I am curious to know how some games could have an IR transmsmitter inside the cartridge like Pokemon Soulsilver, did they plan this specific usecase or a whole channel for limited cartridge expansion components ?

That's actually a pretty good question. The NTR-031 IR cartridges were used for a few games, and there was also one for Motion Sensors and a TV Antenna. From what I can see, it looks like even though they can't extend the functionality directly, they do still interface with the system in some way. Perhaps they are more like a device connected to a serial port would be? So far less capable than the full extension cart…

Hmm. Crazy thought, but there must be some sort of save data function. I wonder if one could exude a ram chip(as opposed to short life flash or eeprom back then) as a storage device, with some fake filesystem, then have the software write updates to that.

As ram, you could read the data on the cartridge, modify it, and thus fake bidirectional comms?

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#43

Post by CTDOCodebases »

rvense wrote: post #20
AdamH12113 wrote: post #6

It’s impressive that developers could afford to make custom ICs for only one or two games. I wouldn’t have thought the revenue would be enough to justify that.

Games on cartridge were quite expensive, I think.

Yes for reference Street Fighter 2 was sold for AUD $120 then which works out to be about AUD $270 when adjusted for inflation. It was priced more than the other games but you get the idea.

For reference a typical Nintendo Switch game will sell for AUD $79 on release.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#44

Post by morcheeba »

fabiensanglard wrote: post #28
Dwedit wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The file sizes given by the site are wrong. Super Mario World is 512KB, or 508KB if you discard the padding at the end. Only compressing it to ZIP format gives you a file size around 360KB.

Yea, after writing this I regretted using zip to estimate usage. Probably would get better number by extracting each zip and look how much zero padding is at the end of the file. WDYT?

hexdump will automatically does "squeezing" of repeated lines. Follow this with a line count and multiply by the bytes/line and you'll get a rough number of non-repetitive bytes. https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/hexdump.1.html

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#45

Post by tetha »

MenhirMike wrote: post #3

I do really like how cartridges on the old systems were essentially equivalent to a PCI Expansion Card in a PC. It was directly connected to the Bus and could do essentially anything. Sadly, that practice ended after the GameBoy Advance, and everything since the Nintendo DS has been purely data storage. This leads to crazy modern enhancements like a Raytracing chip[1], or the MSU1 enhancement chip that is AFAIK not a…

There is also this entirely crazy "NES reverse emulation"[1] Here someone replaces the cartridge with a modern computer and then... weird things start happening. Such as using a NES to present effectively a powerpoint presentation about humor.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#46

Post by rahen »

Dwedit wrote: post #25
solarized wrote: post #5

I hope developers still love to blog details with article mode like this, rather than vlogging it on YouTube. A lot of detail packed into a few kilobytes only. "Super Mario World" is still the masterpiece game ever. It has amazing characters, sprites, and stages packed into only 360 KB.

The file sizes given by the site are wrong. Super Mario World is 512KB, or 508KB if you discard the padding at the end. Only compressing it to ZIP format gives you a file size around 360KB.

It's still quite impressive to fit such a lengthy and fun game into 508KB without any procedural generation, just tight assembly and clever use of bitmaps. This is programming art.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#47

Post by masklinn »

hnlmorg wrote: post #31
qalmakka wrote: post #21

> One of the exceptional characteristics of the Super Nintendo was the ability for game cartridges (cart) to pack more than instructions and assets into ROM chips Wasn't this true even on other Nintendo consoles? Gameboy and Gameboy Color cartridges did similar if not even more outlandish things, like the GameBoy Camera

It was basically true for all 16 and 8bit era consoles

It would probably be more precise to say that it was true for cart-based consoles: likely due to backwards compatibility with the GB port Nintendo supported enhancement carts until the DS (though by then it’d become very uncommon).

And the N64 technically supported cart enhancements though only a small handful of japanese games used it (Morita Shogi 64 had a modem and rj11 adapter in the cart… and RCEs so you can use it as a homebrew vector).

Once cart were replaced with optical drives there was no way to have anything but data shipped with the game, so enhancements was limited to whatever the console designer had specced expansion slots or even just controller ports for.

Then again, as hardware became more complex an expensive, the ROI on bespoke chips got lower and lower. SETA released 3 single-game chips, there’s no way that’s justifiable nowadays.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#48

Post by goosedragons »

MenhirMike wrote: post #3

I do really like how cartridges on the old systems were essentially equivalent to a PCI Expansion Card in a PC. It was directly connected to the Bus and could do essentially anything. Sadly, that practice ended after the GameBoy Advance, and everything since the Nintendo DS has been purely data storage. This leads to crazy modern enhancements like a Raytracing chip[1], or the MSU1 enhancement chip that is AFAIK not a…

That's not entirely true. A few DS carts at least had IR receivers (e.g. Pokemon HeartGold). I think Learn with Pokémon: Typing Adventure adds Bluetooth through the card as well. So there was some limited capability to add features, not quite as exciting as extra CPUs but it's not like any GBA did anything super exciting there either.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#49

Post by sharpneli »

rvense wrote: post #20
AdamH12113 wrote: post #6

It’s impressive that developers could afford to make custom ICs for only one or two games. I wouldn’t have thought the revenue would be enough to justify that.

Games on cartridge were quite expensive, I think.

They were around $60 or your regional equivalent. This means $140+ today assuming 1990 dollar.

Re: Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

#50

Post by johnwalkr »

MenhirMike wrote: post #3

I do really like how cartridges on the old systems were essentially equivalent to a PCI Expansion Card in a PC. It was directly connected to the Bus and could do essentially anything. Sadly, that practice ended after the GameBoy Advance, and everything since the Nintendo DS has been purely data storage. This leads to crazy modern enhancements like a Raytracing chip[1], or the MSU1 enhancement chip that is AFAIK not a…

Street fighter localization is wacky. Why would they swap the same names for different characters?
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